Bergerette - Martinu

Piano Trio in C minor Op 101 - Brahms

Serendipity - Philip Martin

The Cork-based Crawford Piano Trio - Adrian Petcu (violin), Iosef Calef (cello) and Jan Cap (piano) - doesn't often manage to include Dublin in its concert schedules. Indeed, as far as I can make out, their concert at the RDS on Monday was their first in a full evening programme in the capital for nearly a decade.

The group's approach, in the works by Martinu and Brahms at any rate, was geared to an efficient brusqueness. This worked reasonably well in the Martinu, but in Brahms sounded quite strange, the performance seeming to be calculated for lightness, completely avoiding the sort of characterisation you might expect from a work which shares the key of C minor with the composer's First Symphony. Whatever the motivation, the performances were musicianly in style, let down primarily by recurrent blemishes of intonation.

Philip Martin's Serendipity, a 1993 commission celebrating the trio's relationship with the Crawford Gallery in Cork with seven movements based on pictures in the gallery's collection, presented the greatest rewards of the evening. Martin is a composer who often seems reluctant to keep the twinkle in his eye from being reflected in his music. This piano trio, his first, responds to his sources of inspiration with some of the bleakest and most darkly threatening passages I've heard from him. The range of those sources (Edith Somerville, Harry Clarke, Diarmuid O Ceallachain,

Sean Scully, Nathaniel Grogan, Louis le Brocquy and Jack B. Yeats) is matched by a wide range in musical style, although there's little in the piece that couldn't have been written at the time of Martinu's Bergerettes, in 1939. The Crawford's performance conveyed the work persuasively as one of the most substantial achievements in Martin's by no means insubstantial output.